Large-scale, structural manufacturing and/or servicing operations in a number of industries often involve a large number of systems. A number of these operations include tasks that are increasingly being performed by machines and robots. And a number of these machines and robots are placed onboard mobile platforms that move within an environment, such as a building or other facility, to enable the machines and robots to perform their tasks.
Effective use of these mobile platforms often depends on their accurate localization within the environment within which they move, which is often an indoor environment. A number of localization solutions have been developed that may be used for this purpose, but each suffers from issues. For example, current solutions developed for automated guided vehicles rely on the presence of surveyed physical landmarks such as paint, tape, magnets or the like on the floor, and laser reflectors on the walls. These landmarks are time consuming and expensive to install. Furthermore, except for laser reflectors, the landmarks constrain the mobile platform to follow pre-defined routes.
Localization solutions based on laser reflectors, sometimes referred to as laser tracking, require installing reflectors at regular intervals on the perimeter of the indoor environment, and making sure that the platform has a line-of-sight to those reflectors. Natural-feature, laser-localization solutions require a static environment, for which a map is created offline and used online to localize the platform by comparing it with laser scans acquired by the platform. These solutions, however, may not be suitable for cluttered, dynamic environments.
Therefore, it may be desirable to have a system and method that takes into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as possibly other issues.